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Open City
February 2024: Authors of Color
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Open City by Teju Cole - 5 stars (BWF)
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Set in 2003 in NYC, protagonist Julius, originally from Nigeria, is working as a psychiatric resident. He wanders through the streets of NYC and later, Brussels. Readers accompany him as he meets interesting people from different cultural backgrounds, discusses a variety of topics, visits an aging former professor, and engages in spur of the moment activities. It is narrated in first person by Julius. As he wanders, he muses on life, death, sanity, and our ways of being the world. It contains snippets about art, music, literature, history, philosophy, psychology, and relationships.
It contains flashbacks to his days growing up in Nigeria. Julius tries to process his father’s death and estrangement from his German mother. He reflects on the psychiatric disorders he has encountered in his patients. It is set not long after 9-11 and there are several mentions of the impact it had on NYC and the world. There is no plot or deep character development other than Julius. Toward the end, we begin to view Julius in a new light.
It is a book about life. It is about the difficulty in knowing oneself, let alone other people. Perhaps we are all unreliable narrators of our own lives? It is beautifully written and has a mesmerizing quality. It seems profound. I can easily see myself re-reading this book, which is something I rarely do. I simply loved it.
“Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people’s stories, insofar as those stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.”
BWF Team Shadow & Flame - Monthly Spelling - Letter O - Matches Tag Authors of Color x7:
https://www.goodreads.com/work/shelve...